GapCap and CrowdCube provide the perfect ingredients for Capsicana’s growth

Since GapCap’s inception, I have seen so many growing brands use our cashflow finance solution. Seeing them grow is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Fortunately, we are not naïve enough to think that our cashflow solution is the only type of finance that is required as your business scales, and our partnership with Crowdcube (www.crowdcube.com) makes it very easy for fast growth companies to take their ‘growth cap’ equity and also raise working capital from their unpaid invoices with us.

We have been helping Latin American sauce brand Capsicana, deal with some growing orders (and the subsequent long payment terms) from the large supermarkets they are supplying. When they realised that their (incredibly tasty) LatAm sauces were flying off the shelves and they needed to raise some growth capital to really match supply with demand, we suggested Crowdcube.

We conducted a very brief Q&A with Ben at Capsicana, below, which hopefully gives a bit of an insight into how a blend of equity, particularly through crowdfunding and working capital finance can help your business scale quickly.

Capsicana have used both an invoice finance facility, as well as an equity-raising platform. How would you describe your experience using both facilities?

Our experience of invoice financing has been very positive, we love GapCap. The key things that work for us are ease of set up, flexibility, customer services and pricing. Re crowdfunding we’re actually in the middle of our first fundraising campaign on Crowdcube. So far we’ve had a super experience and are over 50% funded.

What are the benefits of using both forms of finance at different stages of Capsicana’s journey?

As regards invoice financing, this has been an incredibly useful facility for us because as a growing business it allows us to better manage our working capital needs. When we first started looking into this we found quite a lot of providers who had high set up fees, minimum contract periods and whole book expectations which wasn’t suitable. We were very pleased when GapCap where recommended to us and we could factor down to the individual invoice.

In addition to day to day financing we needed to raise capital to fund long term growth. Being a consumer brand it made a lot of sense to crowd fund, allowing us to raise finance but also to market our proposition to a wider audience and build a community of brand ambassadors.